Page 17 of My Cowboy Trouble
"Your fancy shirts are becoming. You are not. I asked Clara Mae. She said you're trouble with a capital T."
"Clara Mae's a smart woman." I adjust our position slightly, which means pressing closer. "It's all about rhythm, you know."
"Everything's about rhythm with you, isn't it?" There's something in her tone that makes my blood heat.
"Most things." I guide her hand through another swing, letting my breath skim across her neck. "The best things, anyway."
She shivers despite the ninety-degree weather. "You're doing this on purpose."
"Doing what?" Another swing. Another perfect nail. We're getting into a rhythm now, moving together.
"This." She gestures vaguely at our position with her free hand. "The wholepressed-against-me-teaching-moment thing. The voice thing. The breathing on my neck thing."
Damn, the woman does not mince words. My kryptonite.
"Would you prefer I let you keep shooting nails at innocent bystanders? Because I saw one land near that squirrel, and he looked personally offended."
"You should buy better nails. These ones suck. I wasn't shooting them. They were just... misdirected."
"Is that what we're calling it?" I laugh, and she must feel it rumble through my chest because she shivers again. "Like that time in college when I 'misdirected' my roommate's car into a lake?"
"You drove a car into a lake?"
"Misdirected. Completely different thing. Also, he deserved it. He kept eating my leftover Chinese food."
"That seems like an overreaction. A psycho overreaction."
"You haven't had Chen's General Tso's chicken. Wars have been started over less."
She's laughing now, relaxed against me, and we work like that for the next hour—me guiding her hands, her pretending she doesn't lean back into me every time I get close. The fence is getting fixed, but more importantly, her walls are starting to crack. Every joke, every bit of banter, every perfectly driven nail is another tiny fissure in her defenses.
I can work with cracks. Cracks are just opportunities waiting to happen.
"Okay," she finally says, stepping away after we've replaced an entire section. "I think I've got it now. You can stop... helping."
"You sure?" I watch her line up the next nail, noting that her form is actually pretty good now. "Because I'm happy to keep my hands on—I mean, helping. Happy to keep helping."
She snorts. "Subtle."
"I've never been accused of being subtle. Charming, devastatingly handsome, occasionally heroic, but never subtle."
"Occasionally heroic?"
"Well, there was that time I saved Billy from the bull."
"What bull?"
"The one in the south pasture. Meanest son of a bitch you've ever seen. Billy thought he could pet it."
"He tried to pet a bull?"
"Billy tries to pet everything. We had to put a sign on the electric fence."
She misses the nail entirely, hammering her thumb instead. "Fuck!" She drops the hammer, shaking her hand. "Fucking fuckity fuck!"
I grab her hand, examining the damage. Her thumb is already turning red, but the fingernail's intact. "Not broken. You'll have a hell of a bruise though."
"Great. Another war wound to add to my collection." She doesn't pull her hand away, and I find myselfrubbing my thumb over her wrist. Her pulse jumps under my touch.
